Twitter raises price range; IPO becomes more like Facebook's

Richard Drew / Associated Press

Phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange features a Twitter logo. Twitter will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning after setting a price for its IPO sometime Wednesday evening.

Phone post on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange features a Twitter logo. Twitter will begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday morning after setting a price for its IPO sometime Wednesday evening. (Richard Drew / Associated Press)

Jessica Guynn

SAN FRANCISCO -- Twitter has raised the price range for its hotly anticipated initial public offering to between $23 and $25 ahead of its initial public offering on Thursday.

The move shows demand for the shares are high from institutional investors.

The price boost means Twitter could at the high end of the range and be valued at $13.6 billion.

Twitter plans to sell 70 million shares.

The company initially said it would sell the shares at $17 to $20 apiece, a range that was below analyst expectations.

It’s also a departure from Twitter’s plans to be the “anti-Facebook IPO.” One of the mistakes that Facebook made was to aggressively raise the price of its shares right before the IPO. The move contributed to a decline in its share price.

Twitter executives have been pitching the IPO to investors in a “road show” to major U.S. cities.

Still, investors are skeptical, according to a new Associated Press-CNBC poll.

Nearly half of active investors — meaning investors who adjusted their holdings over the last year – say Twitter would not be a good investment. Forty percent said it would be a good investment. Before Facebook's IPO in May 2012, an AP-CNBC poll found that 54% of active investors thought Facebook would be a good investment, 38% said that it would not.

BTIG Research analyst Richard Greenfield said his firm's recommendation had not changed.

"We would participate within the $23-$25 range, albeit, simple math would dictate that management should price at the bottom-end of the new range," he said in a research note. Previously, he had assumed Twitter would price at the high end of the $17 to $20 range, he said.

Greenfield added that BTIG sees a "path to $30 over the next year, particularly with our estimates well above management expectations." That does not include Twitter's video-sharing service Vine.